PINOLE — The East Bay shoreline between Richmond and Port Costa was once dotted with industrial sites served by ship and railroad access and accompanied by settlements where workers and their families lived.

While company town settlements such as Tormey, Oleum, Eckley and Selby were once thriving concerns and still appear on some maps, most are gone and largely forgotten.

Author John Robinson will discussion on these and other “Lost Cities of the East Bay” at a free presentation hosted by the Pinole Historical Society at 6:30 p.m. Feb. 2 in conference rooms 2A and 2B of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Office Building,1301 Pinole Valley Road.

The public is invited to the free event and refreshments will be served.

“The title of my talk is ‘Lost Cities of the East Bay,’ but the focus is south side of the Carquinez Strait from the Port Costa Brick Works in the east to Point Pinole in the west,” Robinson says. “I use the word ‘cities’ for brevity; these places were never cities, nor even towns. At best they were villages, a collection of ferry and train stops, hotels, stores, company houses, and, mostly, saloons, that sprang up around the factories and plants of the early 20th century.”

Industry was attracted by the abundance of open land in West Contra Costa for operations that were often too dangerous for heavily populated areas, particularly the powder works, the scene of deadly explosions.

Robinson’s illustrated talk will cover the Port Costa Brick Works; waterfront Port Costa during the age of the ferries; Eckley as a brick works, a fishing resort, and now a regional park; Vallejo Junction, a ferry terminal west of Crockett that brought people to South Vallejo and was mentioned in a Robert Louis Stevenson story; the famed smelting plant at Selby; Tormey; the refinery town at Oleum; the Hercules Powder Works; and the Atlas Powder Works at Giant.

“Most of these places are long gone, or absorbed into larger communities,” Robinson says. “ But, they all are interesting footnotes to our local history.”

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